Coping with Life in Ancient Rome. Individual strategies for dealing with urban challenges reflected in the literature of the Late Republic and the Early Empire

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Annemarie Ambühl; Professorin Dr. Christine Walde
• Subject Area: Greek and Latin Philology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 504936196

The research proposal investigates the resources for coping with challenges as they are reflected and transmitted in the Roman literature of the Late Republic and the Early Empire; thereby the focus lies on practical knowledge and advice communicated to individuals who are dealing with the challenges of social life in the city of Rome.In contrast to the prevailing approaches so far, the corpus to be analyzed is not limited to ancient philosophy, but encompasses a wide spectrum of texts whose authors (e.g. Cicero, Ovid, Seneca) advise their audiences how to cope with life problems as an acute remedy or as prophylaxis, based on their own autobiographic or generalized fictive experiences. The addressee-oriented strategies inscribed in the texts enable us to juxtapose the challenges and solutions proposed by the ancient authors with situations of contemporary modern life. In this way, it is possible to distinguish culture-specific from culture-general answers.The challenges to be considered therefore cover a broad area, ranging from crises in the personal life-cycle (e.g. provoked by illness or the ageing process) to relationship issues and extending to existential problems involving the whole society with regard to social cohesion and hierarchies. On the one hand, the ancient metropolis of Rome is to be understood as a tangible urban space that confronts the individual with various everyday stress situations. On the other hand, Rome can be construed as an ideal space and distinguished from other spatial constructs, such as rural environments or places of exile. Through such interfaces potential tensions between individuals and society regarding their respective expectations and practices are highlighted, for instance in coping with grief.One of the main aims of the project is to develop a catalogue of challenges based on a series of exemplary analyzes and to collect and interpret in the form of a handbook the discursive and communicative strategies of coping that are recommended in the respective texts. In order to widen the methodical and conceptual horizon also a selection of the preceding and contemporary Greek literature and the history of reception of the relevant works are to be included through comparative approaches. As a final step, an interdisciplinary dialogue with the disciplines of psychology and psychoanalysis is to be established in order to discuss whether the strategies of coping with life and its problems proposed by the ancient texts might be claimed among others as precursors of methods of modern psychotherapy.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants